All fields of human endeavor use measurement in some form, and each

field has its own set of measuring tools and measuring units.

What is a test?

a procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or

reliability of something, especially before it is taken into

widespread use.

What is a psychological test?

Psychological tests are written, visual, or verbal evaluations administered to

assess the cognitive and emotional functioning of children and adults.

The widespread use of psychological testing is largely aphenomenon of the twentieth century. But the historian mention

In 2200 B.C, when Chines

Emperor had his officials

examined every third year

to determine their fitness for office.

Such testing was modified and refined over the centuries until written

exams were introduced in the Han dynasty (202 B.C-AD200). Five topics

were tested:

Civil Law

Military Affairs

Agriculture

Revenue Geography

The Chines examination system took its final form about 1370, when

proficiency in the Confucian classics was emphasized. In the preliminary

examination, candidates were required to spend a day and night in a

small isolated booth, comprising essay on assigned topics and writing a

poem. The 1 to 7 percent who passed moved up to the district

examinations, which required three separate sessions of three days and three nights

The district examinations were obviously grueling and rigorous, but this

was not the final level. The 1 to 10 percent who passed were allowed the

privilege of going to Peking for the final round of examination. Perhaps

3 percent of this final group passed nation program, the similarities

between their traditions and current testing practices are, in the main

superficial. Not only were their testing practices unnecessarily grueling,

the Chines also failed to validate their selection procedures. Nonetheless

it does appear that the examination program incorporated relevant selection criteria.

Most historians trace the gaining of psychological testing to the experimental

investigation of individual differences that flourished in Germany and Great Britain inthe late 1800s.

Psychological testing owes as much to early psychiatry as it does to the

laboratories of experimental psychology. In fact, the examination of the

mentally ill around the middle of the nineteenth century resulted in thedevelopment of numerous early tests.

These early tests featured the absence of standardization and were

consequently relegated to oblivion. They were nonetheless influential in

determining the course of psychological testing, so it is important to mention a few typical developments from this era.

In 1885, the German physician Hubert von Grashey developed the

antecedent of memory drum as a means of testing brain-injured patients.

his subjects were shown words, symbols, or pictures through a slot in a sheet of paper that was through the moving slot.

Shortly thereafter, the German psychiatrist Conrad Rieger developed

an excessively ambitious test battery for brain damage. His battery took

over 100 hours to administer and soon fell out of favor.

In summary , early psychiatry contributed to the mental test movement

by showing that standardized procedures could help reveal the nature

and extent of symptoms in the mentally ill and brain-injured patients.

Most of the early tests developed by psychiatrists faded into oblivion, but

a few procedures were standardized and perpetuate themselves in modern variations.

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physician, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. Wundt, who noted psychology as a science apart from biology and philosophy, was the first person to ever call himself a Psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig. This marked psychology as an independent field of study.

Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory in 1920 in Leipzig, Germany.

It is less well recognized that he was measuring mental processes years before, at least

as early as 1862, when he experimented with his thought meter. This device was a

calibrated pendulum with needles sticking off from each side. The pendulum would

swing back and forth, striking bells with the needles. The observer’s task was to take

note of the position of the pendulum when the bells sounded. Of course, Wundt could

adjust the needles before-hand and thereby know the precise position of the pendulum

when each bell was struck. Wundt thought that the difference between the observed

pendulum position and the actual position would provide a means of deterring the swiftness of thought of the observer.

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) pioneered the new experimental psychology in 19th

century Great Britain. Galton was obsessed with measurement, and his intellectual

career seems to have been dominated by a belief that virtually anything was measurable.

His attempts to measure intellect by means of reaction time and sensory discrimination

tasks are well known. Yet, to appreciate his wide-ranging interests, the reader should be

apprised that Galton also devised techniques for measuring beauty, personality,

the boringness of lectures, and the efficiency of prayer, to name but a few of the

endeavors that his biographer has catalogued in elaborate detail.

James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944) studied the new experimental psychology with

both Wundt and Galton before setting at Columbia University where, for twenty –six

years, he was the undisputed dean of American psychology. With Wundt, he did a

series of painstakingly elaborate RT studies, measuring with great precision the

fractions of a second presumable required for different mental reactions. He also

noted, almost in passing, that he and another colleague had small but consistent

differences in RT. Cattell proposed to Wundt that such individual differences ought to bestudied systematically.

Among Cattell’s students, it was probably Clark Wissler(1901)

who had the greatest influence on the early history

of psychological testing.

Wissler obtained both mental test scores and

academic grades from more that 300 students at

Columbia University and Barnard College. His goal

was to demonstrate that the test results could predict

academic performance. With our early twenty-first

century perspective on research and testing, it seems

amazing that the early experimentalists waited so long

to do such basic validation research. Wissler’s

research showed virtually no with dynamometer

strength, .02 with color naming, and -,02 with

reaction time. The highest correlation (.16) was

statistically significant because of the large sample size.

However, so humble a correlation carries with it very little predictive utility.

As most every student of psychology knows, Alfred Binet(1857-1911) invented the

first modern intelligence test in 1905. What is less well known, but equally important for

those who seek an understanding of his contributions to modern psychology, is that

Binet was a prolific researcher and author long before he turned his attentions to

intelligence testing .

Binet began his career in medicine, but was forced to drop out because of a complete

emotional breakdown. He switched to psychology, where he with the neurologist

J. m. Charcot(1825-1893) at the famous Salpetriere Hospital.

In 1891 , Binet went to work at the Sorbonne as an unpaid assistant and began a series

of studies and publications that were define his new ‘ individual psychology’ and ultimately to culminate in his intelligence tests.

In 1904, the Minister of Public Instruction in Paris appointed a commission to decide

upon the educational measures that should be undertaken with those children who

could not profit from regular instruction. The commission concluded that medical and

educational examinations should be used to identify those children who could not learn

by the ordinary methods. Furthermore, it was determined that these children should

be removed from their regular classes and given special instruction suitable to their

more limited intellectual prowess. This was the beginning of the special education classroom.

It was evident that a means of selecting children for such special

placement was needed, and Binet and his colleague Simon were called

upon to develop a practical tool for just this purpose. Thus arose the first formal scale for assessing the intelligence of children.

The Binet-Simon scales helped solve a practical social quandary, namely,

how to identify children who needed special schooling. With this

successful application of a mental test , psychologists realized that their

inventions could have pragmatic significance for many different segments

of society. Almost immediately, psychologist in the United States adopted

a utilitarian focus. Intelligence testing was embraced by many as a reliable

and objective response to perceived social problems such as the

identification of immigrants with mental retardation and the quick, accurate classification of Army recruits.

In 1906, Henry H. Goddard was hired by the Vineland Training School in

New Jersey to do research on the classification and education of

“feebleminded” children. He soon released that a diagnostic instrument

would be required and was therefore pleased to read of the 1908

Binet-Simon scale. He quickly set about translating the scale, making minor changes so that it would be applicable to American children.

The earliest of the performance measures

was the Seguin form board, an upright

stand with depressions into which ten

blocks of varying shapes could be fitted.

This had been used by Sequin as a training

device for individuals with mental

retardation, but was subsequently

developed as a test by Goddard, and then

standardized by R.H. Sylvester. This

identical board is still used, with the

subject blindfolded, in the Halstead-

Reitan neuropsychological test battery.

Given the American penchant for efficiency , it was only natural that researchers would

seek group mental tests to supplement the relatively time-consuming individual

intelligence tests imported from France. Among the first to develop group tests was

Pyle(1913) who published schoolchildren norms for a battery consisting of such

well-worn measures as memory span, digit-symbol substitution, and oral word

association (quickly writing down words in response to a stimulus word).

The slow pace of developments in group testing picked up dramatically as the United

States entered World War 1 in 1917, It was then that Robert M. Yerkes, a well known

psychology professor at Harvard, convinced the U.S. government and the Army that all

of its 1.75 million recruits should be given intelligence tests for purposes of

classification and assignment . Immediately upon being commissioned into the Army as a

colonel, Yerkes assembled a Committee on the Examination of Recruits, which met at

the Vineland school in New Jersey to develop the new group tests for the assessmentof Army recruits.

Two group tests emerged from this collaboration: the Army Alpha and the Army Beta, It would

be difficult to overestimate the influence of the Alpha and Beta upon subsequent intelligence tests

The format and content of these tests inspired developments in group and individual testing for

decades to come.

Aptitude tests measure more specific and delimited abilities that intelligence tests.

Traditionally, intelligence tests assess a more global construct such as trust, a single

aptitude test will measure just one ability domain , and a multiple aptitude test batterywill provide scores in several distinctive ability areas.

The development of aptitude tests lagged behind that of intelligence tests for two

reasons, one statistical, the other social. The statistical problem was that a new

technique, factor analysis, was often needed to discern which aptitude s were primaryand therefore distinct from each other.

Modern personality testing began

when Woodworth attempted to

develop an instrument for detecting

Army recruits who were susceptible

to psychoneurosis. Virtually all the

modern personality inventories,

schedules, and questionnaires owe

a debt to Woodworth’s Personal

Data Sheet.

The personal Data Sheet consisted of

116 questions that the subjected was

to answer by underlining Yes or No.

The projective approach originated with the word association method

pioneered by Francis Galton in the late 1800s. Galton gave himself four

seconds to come with as many association as possible to a stimulus

word, and then categorized this associations as parrot like,

image-mediated, or histrionic representations. This later category

convinced him that mental operations “sunk wholly below the level of

consciousness” were at play. Some historians have even speculated that

Freud’s application of free association as a therapeutic tool in psychoanalysis sprang from Galton’s paper published in Brain in 1879.

In 1919-1920, Yoakum developed a

pool of 1,000 items relating to interests

from childhood through early maturity.

While clinicians were developing

measures for analyzing personality and

unconscious conflicts, other psychologists

were devising measures for guidance and

counseling of the masses of more normal

persons.

Thank You

shirazi